Monday, May 18, 2009

Pusherman Reprise

The original Pusherman featured the demise of Pablo Escobar and the dangerous Mexican meth manufacturers. It was nothing more than a subversive attempt to rally my fellow Americans to legalize online poker and drugs. Heck, let's throw hookers in there too, and we'll let gays marry as well.

There's a brutal drug war raging across the border in Mexico right now. I make half-baked jokes about donkey blood on the Tao of Poker, but the streets of Juarez are flowing with the blood of causalities of one of the gruesomest violence since the Opium Wars.

I'm hoping to make enough money with Lost Vegas so I can fund a book about the Mexican drug war. At the least, I'd get a Rolling Stone-type article out of it and a couple of screenplay ideas. I've already pitched one idea to a soused studio exec well into his second of four Martinis... "It's Traffic meets Proof of Life meets Nacho Libre... lots of guns, drugs, and fat guys running around in Mexican wrestling masks."

Sadly, my attempt to bring Harold and Kumar Go to the World Series of Poker fell short of the mark. Poker movies don't do well in Hollywood. And I shelved the poker script I was working on about a deaf-mute Belgium nun who wins the WSOP in order to save an orphanage in Bruges. I'm gonna wait for the next poker boom and dust off both scripts and make a million dollars. Doesn't matter the economic environment... investors will flock to where ever there's potential to earn money and not piss it away.

Alas, for now I have a book to plug. The third draft of Lost Vegas is complete. Due date is still TBA. Let's just say October 2009 for shits and giggles.

The book is about Las Vegas and addiction, two topics I happen to know a little bit about.

Coke and Meth. Did it ever occur to you that those two drugs are an integral part of Sin City? The imported drugs came from somewhere and it's not like the Bellagio has a cocaine lab underneath the fountains, and that they've been cooking up batches of meth inside the Castle for years.

OK, so those are unlikely scenarios. Women and children in Peru and Bolivia are growing and cultivating coca leaves, while the Colombians refine it and flying the product to Mexico where the cartels are slugging it out for financial control of the windfall that they get for smuggling cocaine into the United States which eventually gets shipped up to Las Vegas and snorted off the tits of a stripper in the VIP room at the Rhino. Thomas Friedman would get a hard on at that example of globalization.

According to report from the National Drug Intelligence Center released in June 2008 called "Nevada High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Drug Market Analysis"....

The distribution and abuse of ice methamphetamine pose the most significant drug threat to the Nevada HIDTA region. Most of the ice methamphetamine available in the region is supplied by Mexican DTOs (Drug Trafficking Organizations) that produce the drug in large-scale clandestine laboratories in Mexico. Mexican DTOs typically have been able to fully meet demand for the drug in the Nevada HIDTA region...

Powder cocaine is readily available throughout Nevada. Mexican DTOs transport the drug into the region from Mexico through POEs in California and Arizona. Mexican DTOs use the HIDTA region as a distribution center for cocaine. These DTOs supply wholesale quantities to other traffickers in the region and to traffickers operating in drug markets throughout the country, particularly markets in midwestern and eastern states. They also supply local African American and Hispanic street gangs with powder cocaine for conversion into crack cocaine. Street gangs typically distribute crack in urban areas, primarily Las Vegas and Reno.

So even the local federales know where it's coming from, but they are unable to stem the flow of meth and cocaine into Las Vegas. Because of the intense demand of narcotics, organized crime groups and gangs have risen to power. According to the report, the Asian mafia controls the ecstasy trade while black and Hispanic gangs in North Las Vegas are cooking up crack and selling meth.

I'm not saying that there are people in Salt Lake City that don't do drugs, it's just that there's a higher demand for the heavy stuff in Las Vegas. Millions of people fly to Las Vegas every year in an attempt to shed moral responsibility and engage in behavior that is frowned upon in their neighborhoods. That expression, "What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas" also includes recreational drug use.

Visitors descend upon Las Vegas to gamble and party... with some solely there for the non-stop party. The casinos don't get rich off of those people since they stay out of the pits. That's why they built chic clubs and bars on the different properties in order to siphon off there money in that manner. Yet, they're in direct competion with the shadow drug trade that operates in the Valley of Death. The club culture is fueled by the triumvirate party drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, and meth. The Strip is cluttered with dozens and dozens of clubs and lounges that are a haven for the illicit trade, thereby creating an even larger demand for narcotics. You didn't think everyone was able to stay up to 11am on a couple of Red Bulls?

Then there's the underground sex industry and the murky world of strip clubs. So not every stripper or prostitute is a cokehead, but sex industry works operate in similar circles of the local drug trade. If they're not sex slaves held captive against their will, the rest of them are slaves to their own addictions which drove them towards a path of immorality. In short, someone has to keep those strippers jacked up.

And how about all those crooked doctors in the Valley? Oxycontin and other opiates in pill form are accessible via prescription fraud where doctors to write you a script for the drug of your choice as long as you grease them with cash. Shopping for crooked doctors is common routine for pill poppers who go through every name in the phone book until they found one doctor with a weakness for cash.

Tin Foil Hat Time. A friend of mine who was a local told me about his conspiracy theory that meth is cheaper in Las Vegas because the powers to be want degenerate gamblers tweaking away the rest of their dollars. That's pretty far fetched that the gaming conglomerates would subsidize drug dealers to keep prices low, making drugs more affordable to the broke-dick gamblers who have a little more money to gamble with. Most drug addicts are always looking for ways to fund their next bender. Las Vegas gives addicts an opportunity for a big score (on a minimal investment... $5 at blackjack or $1 for a slot pull), but when they miss, that's when it gets ugly and crime rates soar. Break ins. Car theft. Credit card fraud. The responsibility of cleaning up that fallout falls upon the shoulders of local law enforcement and the courts.